Relief rolls stand at 820,000 -- about 12 percent of the city. Hospitals report cases of starvation.
1933
Rebelling against Tammany Hall, the city elects Fiorello La Guardia mayor on
a Fusion ticket.
1934
Nelson Rockefeller orders destruction of a Diego Rivera mural he had commissioned for 30 Rockefeller Center because it included a depiction of Lenin.

City imposes 2 percent sales tax for relief efforts.

Knickerbocker Village opens, first in a series of public housing projects.
1936
Rikers Island opens
for business, as does Robert Moses' Triborough Bridge nearby.
1937
Anne Farley of the Bronx is city's first woman to serve as a juror.

January 25, 1998

TOUGHTIMES FOR ACITY OFTENANTS

By GRACE PALEY

ANY years before I understood that the personal was
political, I had begun to take
the political very personally.
It was the defeat of Al Smith
in 1928 that hurt my feelings. For some
reason up and down my Bronx street, large
photographs of Smith had appeared in the
butcher's window, the grocer's and the candy store. I was certain he would be our
President. I was about 5 1/2, at the time
patriotic, the owner of several American
flags; I believed in voting and martyrdom.
Anyway, how could a man absolutely unknown to the neighborhood become President of the whole country?

Fairchild Aerial Surveys,Inc.

AN AERIAL VIEW of the Chrysler Building in 1930.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, where industry was flowering in a noxious way, my
future father-in-law, a sweet and stubborn
man, an immigrant who had become a
chemist, was being advised by the German-speaking family he had married into that he
ought to be a little more ambitious. He was
now an American, after all. So, shortly after
the defeat of Smith, he resigned from his
excellent job.

The next thing to happen was the year
1929. That year and its followers, '30, '31 and
'32, during which unemployment became
normal, shamed him. Like every American,
like me, he was taking the political very
personally. He finally lost his little house in
Ramsey and moved his family (for the next
12 years) into his brother-in-law's house.
Every morning he retired to the basement,
where, among killing odors and in poor
lighting, he developed a cleanser for white
materials (maybe gabardine). His cleanser
was truly superior.

After some years he had figured out how
not to leave a ghostly ring around the
cleansed area. By the time the life-saving
war arrived, his product had become a
luxurious essential. He bought, proudly, a
little house in Forest Hills, and my mother-in-law unpacked her barely used wedding
linens for us to marvel at their old-fashioned
linen-ness.

I have told two small, personal stories. Of
course the second was not personal at all.
But in our city, a city of tenants, all hard-working -- mostly in the garment trade --
and mostly Jewish (though it was said that
even within our own 10-block neighborhood,
a couple of real Americans lived and
worked), the loss of a rented 3- or 4-room
apartment was as terrible as the small-town
loss of a nearly all-paid-for house.

The greatest shock to me after Smith
failed was the sight from my middle-class
window of my friends' family furniture out
on the street, the beloved couch, the dining-room table upon which no one in the immediate family had ever been allowed to eat --
all draped in old curtains, cloths, a blanket,
no sure cover from the rain, no safety from
thieves.

The neighbors, as I remember, then went
from apartment to apartment gathering
nickels and dimes that would enable the
evicted family to find a new place to live.
This was usually only a couple of blocks
away, where, because landlords were also in
trouble, they might get three months' concession. So there was a kind of vagabondage
even within the neighborhood. Families
moved six or seven times before home relief
appeared, before Hoover, the man who beat
Smith, was beaten himself.

Meanwhile, in our house and neighborhood, grown-ups 15 years ahead of me were
trying to speak English better. I thought we
all spoke extremely well, although some of
our teachers, real Americans, not first- or
second-generation immigrants, had trouble
with my dental t's and sibilant s's.

I've
clung to them sentimentally, but for those
older people wanting to teach, new tests and
oral exams were invented to prevent us
(Jews? Italians?) from invading the teaching professions.

We did invade. Which should be a lesson to
all those creators of reasons to keep the next
wave, ethnic or of color, out of the businesses and professions of American life.

The 1928 election was not the end of my
contact with large events. My kindergarten
and other classes were invited by Mayor
Jimmy Walker to meet him on East 174th
Street. Clusters of children, with an occasional stalk of large person sticking up,
waited silently, tired, having walked long
blocks from Public School 50 on Vyse Avenue. Mayor Walker, of whom I had grown
quite fond of in about 10 minutes, leaned on a
steel beam and said, well, something. He
seemed to have some relation to Al Smith. I
had not yet connected them to the fearsome
Irish a couple of dozen blocks south of us.

What was Mayor Walker inviting us to?
The grand opening of the East 174th Street
steel bridge. It didn't seem so then, but this
bridge could have become important to the
Bronx in a modest way. All roads, all
bridges connect and lead us away or to. This
bridge poured the Bronx eastward into little
booms of real estate, little houses and short
tenements. If 1929 and its crash hadn't arrived so precipitously, more and bigger tenements would have come of it.

Still, Robert Moses might have noticed
that pathetic attempt to connect and considered what he could do to the Bronx, how he
could really drive all those "aways" and
"tos" through its hills and cliffs. That would
be the Cross-Bronx Expressway. But that
would happen later. Meanwhile, he had the
Riverside Drive parks to tend, almost
enough for now.

One nice, mid-1930's day, my mother
asked me to take a folding chair and go to
Southern Boulevard and sit. In about two
hours, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
would drive by. She wanted a reserved
front-row sight of him. In an hour and a half,
she came for her seat under the IRT elevated-subway tracks. Thunder above and hurrays in Yiddish, Russian, Polish and English
below. He arrived, waved to my mother and,
in a slow minute, passed. It turns out that
Roosevelt was the President my neighborhood had come to this country for.

Times Wide World Photos

MAYOR JAMES J. WALKER played at his 51st birthday party at a Bronx orphanage.

OME people were sure he would lead
us peacefully to socialism. Some
thought he was only a co-opter and
capitalism would be strengthened. Other
people had become obsessed with Russia's
obsession with Trotskyism and turned
American electoral politics over to liberals,
transferring their anxieties to work in the
labor movement and sometimes literature.

There finally seemed to be economic
intelligence at work. You could say that
Roosevelt had the confidence of his class
and the courage of a person who had faced
intense physical suffering. Dealing with the
mockers and haters was not so hard.

He
began almost at once to cook up that great
alphabet soup of attention to the national
despair. I learned that misery was happening everywhere, beyond those groups of
men standing hopelessly on our neighborhood street corners. Though our economic
system's most successful solution to depression or disaster has been war and its necessary industries, for a few years the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Works Progress
Administration, the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Civil Conservation Corps
and the Social Security Act were generous
attempts.

We have not been allowed to look back
unmockingly at that period, but time, having
been invented by a clock, rolls over and
over. Within those years, the foolish post-World War I idea that Germany could be
starved into peacefulness was giving way to
an agreement not to prevent the development of its military and industrial power.
With luck, its anger and humiliation could
be turned eastward.

It must have been a year when I was still
a short child that my mother picked up a
newspaper and, pointing to a picture of
Hitler next to a small article, said to my
father, "Zenya, look, it's coming again."

Did Laurence Stallings's great warning
book, "The First World War," a photographic history, appear in our house a little
later? It ends with Hitler, Mussolini, Ataturk and Stalin in powerful shooting poses.
The rest of the pictures of that terrible war
made my friends and me sign the Oxford
pledge never to go to war. Though we
weren't asked to, we wore black armbands
and were suspended for several days.

And then it was 1937 and Ernest Hemingway, among other young Americans and
Europeans, went to Spain.

The United States had, it seemed, decided
to abandon the democratically elected Spanish Government, while Germany and Russia
experimented on the body of Spain with all
sorts of new equipment they might need in a
more serious war.

In my high school, Evander Childs, we
held many rallies and demonstrations. We
wept for Spain and wrote poems. But to our
amazement, the Italian kids, sweet, passionate and pacific (at the same time), were
suddenly ablaze with pride when Mussolini
invaded Ethiopia.

Grace Puley's newest nonfiction collection "Just As I Thought," will be publised in April by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.